5. My Little Eye

On families lost and found

‘What can he see?’ the Ahlbergs ask of the little baby standing in his cot at the beginning of Peepo! (or Peek-A-Boo! in the US version). The hole in the facing page is almost the circle of his little eye, through which we can spy. Seeing and being seen is one of the great, profound subjects of toddler literature. Hiding and seeking; absence and presence.

Small children are notoriously terrible at knowing when they are hidden. ‘Can you see me?’ they ask, covering their eyes with their hands, while parents contemplate whether their children are absolute idiots. For a long time psychologists thought this was because they were egocentric, unable to imagine anyone else’s perspective. More recently, though, experiments have suggested otherwise – Henrike Moll at the University of Southern California has observed that: ‘young children consider mutual eye contact a requirement for one person to be able to see another.’ (This is why they deem their little sister putting a tea towel over their head an effective strategy in a game of hide and seek.)

Sigmund Freud also famously observed how his grandson liked to play a game of making a cotton reel disappear and then reappear, throwing it out of his cot and forcing his mother to return it. Freud interpreted his babbles of ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ as an attempt to say the German words fort (gone) and da (there). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud suggested that his grandson was re-enacting a scenario over which he had no control – his parent leaving him and then coming back – creating a sort of vengeful game in which he was now in charge. Compulsively repeating it was comforting; a way to reassure himself of object permanence.

It is notable that the most beloved toy book mechanisms in picture books, the pop-up and the flap, allow a disappearance and then appearance to be acted out, over and over (and over and over and over) again. Fort-da. Fort-da.

In Peepo!, the father kissing the baby goodnight at the end is wearing his soldier’s uniform, about to leave his child for months, or at the risk of forever.

Does the baby see that his father is going? The toddler peering at the book now is unlikely to register this underlying drama. Ahlberg has said: ‘It’s a mistake to think that a book for little children has to be like a glass of water so that every single element in it is accessible and clear and understood by a three-year-old.’

The question of what the child comprehends or doesn’t is a recurring one in literature for small children. What is hidden in plain sight or simple words.

Take the earliest art form babies enjoy, the lullaby. They are listening, but it is probable that they are not understanding. Because of this there is a tension at the heart of them. Lorca has a stunning essay ‘On Lullabies’ which has the best description of a research process ever. (In A. S. Kline’s translation, Lorca says: ‘You will find me wherever a boy’s ear opens, rosy and tender, or a girl’s ear, white and fearfully awaiting the pin that pierces a hole for an earring.’) Lorca speaks of how rhythm and repetition are needed to send the babe into a stupor, but ‘no mother wants to be a snake-charmer’. It often feels as though the message of their soothing lulla-noises directly contradicts the darkness of the lyrics. ‘When the bough breaks the cradle will fall …’ ‘There’s a poor wee little lamby. / The bees and the butterflies pickin’ at its eyes.’ They superficially soothe, while actually articulating the 4 a.m. fear of the sleep-deprived women who composed them, many of whom must have lived in times of terrible infant mortality. Some seem weighted with anxious threats – some of the oldest surviving lullabies, from Babylon in 2000 BC, tell the baby off for disturbing the House God with crying. In seventeenth-century Aragon they sang of the bogeyman: ‘Sleep, child, sleep now … Here comes the Coco and he will eat you’; while Kenyan women sing: ‘rock, rock, the baby who cries will be eaten by a hyena.’ There could even be a case made for some lullabies being the earliest poems of post-natal depression. Lorca argues that ‘Spain utilizes its saddest melodies and most melancholy texts to tinge her children’s first slumber’, sung by mothers and poor, working-class wet nurses:

This little turtle-dove

Hasn’t got a mother,

A gipsy woman bore him

And left him in a gutter.

Missing mothers. Missing fathers. Daddy’s gone a-hunting.

When Gruff was born I decided to find a lullaby I liked online and learn it by heart to sing to him. During my research I stumbled on a BBC World Service documentary, The Language of Lullabies, which argued that in every culture the signature inflections of the mother tongue are carried in lullabies, and that their frequent use of 6/8 time mimics the movement of the womb. It also featured a snatch of an old Manx song I spent an afternoon memorizing. It was not as dark as many others, but was still about going and returning; our loved ones needing to be both wild and to come home:

Oh hush thee my dove, oh hush thee my rowan,

Oh hush thee my lapwing, my little brown bird.

Oh fold thy wings and seek thy nest now,

Oh shine the berry on the bright tree,

The bird is home from the mountain and valley.

Oh horo hi ri ri. Cadul gu lo.

Fort-da, fort-da.

The first books with moving paper parts were for adults, not children. Benedictine monk Matthew Paris used volvelles (rotatable wheel charts) to help monks calculate holy days in his thirteenth-century Chronica Majora. The device was later used to teach anatomy and astrology. Landscape architect Capability Brown used flaps to illustrate before-and-after views of his gardens, while Thomas Malton’s Compleat Treatise on Perspective, in Theory and Practice; on the True Principles of Dr. Brook Taylor (1775) is the first known commercially produced pop-up book, with three-dimensional shapes pulled up by strings to teach perspective.

Some of the first three-dimensional and tab-activated books designed to entertain children were produced by Lothar Meggendorfer in Germany during the nineteenth century. Sendak has said of him: ‘he was the supreme master of animation; every gesture, both animal and human, coarse and refined, was conveyed via the limited but, in his hands, versatile technique of moveable paper parts.’ Such books, though, were for an elite audience. It was only in 1929, when British book publisher S. Louis Giraud began producing ‘living models’ that sprang up automatically when the book was opened, moderately priced and printed on coarse, inexpensive paper, that a mass-market version of these intricate machines became available. They quickly became extremely popular, especially after, in 1930s New York, Blue Ribbon Publishing managed to find an even more commercial model. They animated Walt Disney characters with ‘pop-ups’, inventing the term.

The first time you read a pop-up with a child, it is full of wonderful surprises, every line seemingly loaded with exclamation marks. Every page is a jack-in-the-box; a dancer springing out of a cake. They squeal as the shark lurches for them or the ghost jumps out; coo over the fireworks and bouquets. Afterwards, by the fourth or fifth time, the game is to re-enact the surprise: eeek, ooooh, wow! The pleasure is in repeating the little drama of reading.

The flap book is similar, but somehow even more satisfying (and pleasingly for the parent, the mechanisms are not so delicate and easily broken, or at least are more easily fixable with Sellotape than a pop-up book’s elaborately structured toucan beaks or meerkat pyramids). Dear Zoo (1982) by Rod Campbell is a favourite in our house – so pleasurable for the child in the way they get to be a finickity consumer, constantly sending back their gifts to the zoo (the lion is too fierce; the elephant is too heavy; the frog is too jumpy) rather than having to smile and say thank you for whatever ugly, unsuitable present a relative has regifted. But the ultimate flap book, the one that really popularized the genre, is Where’s Spot? (1980) by Eric Hill.

Hill was born in Holloway, North London, in 1927. Aged just twelve he was an evacuee, sent to the small village of Bluntisham, though he returned to London that Christmas and stayed for the rest of the war. Perhaps this early experience of being removed from his family and then reunited with them influenced the central plotline of Where’s Spot? Something in its story of a mother trying to find her son chimes on a deep, emotional level with toddlers.

The Blitz left its impact on Hill. Quitting school at fourteen to work as an errand boy in an art studio, he was encouraged to draw cartoons and particularly enjoyed copying aeroplanes. Later he did a stint with the Royal Air Force, posted in Germany. Hill has described Spot as a golden retriever puppy ‘with a mix of hound to provide the characteristic markings’ but has also observed that: ‘It must have been subconscious but I realized that when I came to draw the spot on his body and the tip of his tail I was copying the markings on an aircraft.’

Like Dick Bruna with Miffy, Eric Hill always aimed for a simplicity that made his puppy a ‘ready-made trademark of its kind’. He began each drawing with a black pen outline, then used a brush dipped in watercolour inks to produce an almost flat colour. He chose the typeface – Century Schoolbook Infant – and, at first, said pictures of Spot should only be placed against a white background. It was the flaps, though, that made Where’s Spot? such an innovative book. Hill was a graphic designer working on advertising flyers with a ‘lift-the-flap’ feature when his two-year-old son, Christopher, watched one work and delightedly demanded he ‘Do it again!’ Though flaps had occasionally been used in more elaborate ‘toy books’, no one had aimed them at the youngest market, with the simple format of one flap per spread they could open themselves. His innovation allowed babies too young to understand language to interact with books.

Although Spot is, of course, a great pun (because you have to spot him), it is seemingly a hard one to translate, so Hill allowed flexibility in translation, letting common puppy names from each country be used. The adventures of Spot have since been translated into 65 languages, including Inupiaq, Occitan, Frisian and Faroese, and his names include Dribbel (the Netherlands), Fleck (Germany), Korochan (Japan), and Smot (Welsh). In the dog-loving UK he has become a national treasure – a recent study by Millward Brown reported that Spot had 99 per cent awareness amongst UK parents and 83 per cent amongst children.

Many Spot books followed the first, which is still the best. Where’s Spot? is full of surreal, surprising details: the tables have cabriole legs; a crocodile snaps ‘No’ beneath the bed’s valance; the piano is a pink baby grand with a hippo inside. On the other hand, it’s just a recognizable, homely story about a mother and child playing hide and seek, with the added narrative urgency that his dinner is going cold and his mum is starting to think he is ‘naughty’ for hiding. The child can both ‘help’ his mother to find Spot and help Spot to be found.

(Having said that, I always assumed it was quite a liberal household because Spot’s mum is known by her first name, Sally.)

Hide and seek is a kind of hunt. Perhaps, long ago, it was training for that – for the boys who needed to learn how to hide from a predator, to creep up on a rabbit or a deer? Another interesting book about family and finding is Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (1989). Interestingly, the text is, almost verbatim, an American children’s song that Rosen would perform as part of his poetry readings (it’s also sometimes a lion hunt). Asked to turn it into a book, Rosen lengthened it with a forest and snowstorm and a few more juicy onomatopoeic phrases (swishy swashy), but left it largely unchanged. His original manuscript, in the Seven Stories Archive, has ‘retold by Michael Rosen’ at the top, though in the edition I have the publishers seem to have quietly dropped this, keen to suggest that it is Rosen’s own work (and therefore in copyright, I suppose).

The genius of the book, Rosen has generously admitted, lies in the illustrator Helen Oxenbury’s interpretation of the text. He originally envisioned a King, Queen and Jester and the manuscript, larded with Tippex, is full of stage directions suggesting a conga of people, swaggering, etc., yet Oxenbury seems to have ignored these entirely. Instead she has drawn a family, based on her own children, seeking the bear through a very English landscape. When Rosen first saw the watercolours he ‘couldn’t figure out what they had to do with a bear hunt. It looked like a family having a holiday in Cornwall.’

Most readers, myself included, see a father on the cover with his three children, but though Oxenbury describes him as ‘the dad’ in a 1989 interview with Leonard S. Marcus, she has since said the tallest figure was meant to be her eldest son, admitting: ‘I actually failed to make him look like a young teenager.’ Chanting the rhyme, our little gang pass through mudflats, a forest, fields, and a beach with a cave Oxenbury based on Druidstone in Pembrokeshire. This is a land in which bears were long ago hunted to extinction. The rhyme is just play: a walking song, used to persuade the younger ones to continue the adventure (‘Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!’). The last thing they actually expect to encounter is an actual bear.

But then there it is, with four exclamation marks !!!!

Of course, they’re not actually capable of killing (they’re middle class!). The family run back – through snow, woods, mud, fields, river – with the illustrations brilliantly becoming like a strip cartoon to reflect the acceleration of the text. They pile into the house (shutting the door just in time) and plunge under the thick, pink covers of their bed.

There, the baby picks up its teddy – the bear of human imagining – and smiles with delight. The real bear, shoulders slumped, heads back to its lonely cave. As T. S. Eliot observed: ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality.’ (Not a pun, I promise.) In seeking and hiding, the family unit has been reinforced, and the outsider has served its purpose.

Owl Babies (1992), written by Martin Waddell and illustrated by Patrick Benson, also explores family relationships through absence and presence. Waddell has spoken interestingly about how ‘animals are used in picture books because you can make them do things that you wouldn’t be able to let children do’, and in Owl Babies the babies are put in a situation that would be impossible to depict in the human world without the mother being reported to social services. They wake in a dark wood and find she has gone, leaving them entirely alone. With their podgy bodies, stumpy wings and flattened, big-eyed faces owls make the perfect avian substitute for toddlers (hence their ubiquity in books such as I’m Not Scared and WOW! Said the Owl). The three owl babies each react differently, with Sarah trying to be grown-up and sensible, Percy not really helping, and little Bill only able to utter the desperate refrain: ‘I want my mummy!’

The pictures are densely, delicately inked in a way that makes their home – a hole in a trunk – feel vividly, warmly woody. I’m always struck by the few precise details: the cosiness of the twigs and leaves mixed in with their own ‘owl feathers’. Patrick Benson has spoken of how when he first read the text he felt ‘unnerved by the prospect of having to draw several pictures of baby owls having a long chat’ but he managed it by thinking like a director, zooming in and out and changing perspective. He also credited Amelia Edwards at Walker Books for much of the book’s beauty. She suggested drawing images in black ink on white paper ‘leaving a black area out of which the text would be reversed’, then transferring the drawings to clear acetate so he could paint the colour ‘on a new sheet of paper, very loosely with watercolours’. This was doubly clever, both making the production of foreign language editions easy and allowing ‘a really rich, lustrous black finish as the black plate was not affected by an overlay of colour’.

The darkness feels palpable.

The interest of the book lies in the question of what your mother does when she’s not with you. It is a thought experiment many small children have barely attempted, yet the owl babies spend most of the pages pondering this. Is she hunting? Is she getting them treats (‘mice and things that are nice’ in Sarah’s rhyming phrase)? Is she lost? Has she been caught by a fox?

The spread on which the Owl Mother returns shows this, beautifully, from a vantage point high in the treetops. We see her swooping back towards her babies, who are in the distance with their backs to her, not yet aware their ordeal is over. It says simply, with heartfelt relief: ‘And she came.’ Waddell has spoken of how originally there was much more text: ‘They were the best lines I wrote, but when I saw the image I knew they were redundant.’

Behind every story, a different story.

Martin Waddell was born in Belfast in 1941. Just before the Blitz, Waddell’s family moved to Newcastle, County Down, beneath the Mountains of Mourne. As a child, life in the area was idyllic, populated by animals and folktales. After his parents split in the 1950s, he moved to London where he signed for Fulham F. C. before realizing he was not going to be able to make his living as a professional footballer. When he turned his hand to writing he found immediate success with a comic thriller, Otley, made into a film starring Tom Courtenay. Then, in 1969, he married Rosaleen, and they settled back in County Down, at Donaghadee.

Waddell has described, in an interview with The Independent, how, following the birth of his second son in 1972, a life-altering event occurred. His young family now lived opposite a Catholic church, and the local UDA would often perform their drill in the street outside. One evening, after he saw a gang of kids hurrying away from the church, Waddell entered the vestry to investigate and saw ‘what looked like a wasp’s nest on a chair. The “nest” lit up.’ It was a bomb. His first thought after he regained consciousness was that his family were dead. For months afterwards, he would wake up screaming.

For six years, such was the ‘total body shock’ he suffered, Waddell couldn’t work, so ended up looking after his three small sons at home. In the winter of 1972, they rented a dilapidated house on a rock overlooking the sea, its kitchen often ankle-deep in water. He has said that he was ‘given a privilege which very few fathers have: the day-to-day business of looking after the kids. This didn’t feel very much like a privilege at the time but it actually led to the richest vein of my own work.’ He thought of moving far away but felt too deeply attached to County Down. He watched his children grow up where he had grown up, and where all his stories are set, at the foot of the Mourne Mountains: his precious, vulnerable, only home.

In 1978 the writing somehow returned. His father had always told him that ‘writing books will butter you no parsnips’, but Waddell began to draw on his experiences as a father to write picture books. By 1988, when his Can’t You Sleep, Little Bear? (illustrated by Barbara Firth) won the Smarties Prize, he was an ‘overnight success’. Farmer Duck (1991) followed, with pictures by Helen Oxenbury, which she pithily sums up as ‘a sort of Animal Farm … for babies’. Then came Owl Babies.

Waddell has claimed it was written in about three hours after an event in a local supermarket. He came across a small, scared girl standing absolutely still, repeating over and over, ‘I want my mummy!’ They found her mother eventually, and Waddell had found a story.

When she returns, the Owl Mother wants to know why there is so much fuss. ‘You knew I’d come back.’ It is, on one level, a comforting tale, used to reassure children with separation anxiety that they are being irrational.

But of course, on another level, Waddell knows their fear is not irrational. And anyway, what was the mother doing? When talking about the book with my friend Hannah, she said that her son is always indignant that the mother doesn’t bring back nice juicy mice in her beak. What force of nature made the owl leave her children, then? From what truth is she protecting them? Foxes do indeed prowl outside. The UDA practise; nests explode; wives and babies perish. The father who wakes screaming and the child who shrieks for her mummy both share the same terror.

One of my first memories is of being without my mother for a few days. When pregnant with my sister, my mum had a threatened miscarriage and went into hospital, so my dad fended for us as well as he could by taking me to the chippy. I would only have been one and a half. I can picture the bottles of Space Special and Dandelion & Burdock. The lady there gave me two chips wrapped in a scrap of greaseproof paper, which I ate on the dry-stone wall outside, my father saying: ‘What are we going to do, eh?’ (But he must have told me this, surely.)

Anecdotally, other people’s first memories often seem triggered by a shock – a fall; the sight of blood; a seagull snatching a sandwich. Perhaps my trigger was the shock of my mother not being around. Most of the time she was a constant. She was patient, tireless, and always, I now recognize, generous enough to scream as if genuinely startled when I popped out of the linen basket with the wicker lid on my head, like one of Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves. She was pretty, warm, tatty-nailed. Her hair changed a lot in those years, from blonde to brown to red, as if she was trying to work out how a mum should look. In my memory we are on her bed and I am balanced on her bare feet like an acrobat; she is opening an oven door and pulling out a tray of rock cakes, with their sweet singed smell.

There was a time, though, when everything was subtly different. My Uncle Paul – my mother’s brother – had a terrible accident when hang-gliding. He was brain-damaged, in a coma for weeks before he died; there but gone. I remember sitting with my father in the car outside the hospital as she visited him. I remember the phone ringing one night, after a dark drive home from my grandparents’ house in Salford. My mum answered and began to howl.

I was too young to attend the funeral. I knew, that day, I had to be kind to my mum when she came back. But what about the other days? For me, Uncle Paul was just a couple of memories – a handsome, charismatic man who had sat in our living room; slightly intimidating, obviously special. How could I know the gnawing absence grief leaves? What it means for your brother to hide from you forever, where you can never, ever find him?

In the months afterwards, I recall my Grandad Cranshaw, who usually giddily tickled us saying he was ‘Mr Croc’, nursing his anger. I recall my mother having a couple of furious tantrums; once leaping out of a moving car. After our first holiday abroad to Spain, finding our photos hadn’t come out, she smashed the camera on the kitchen floor, stamping and screaming like Rumpelstiltskin until it was irredeemably broken. I never joined the dots between these episodes and loss until recently.

A couple of times, she declared to my sister and me that she was so sick of something she was going to run away with the gypsies. The only gypsies I knew were the raggle-taggle ones in Hilda Boswell’s Treasury of Poetry, in which the Lady’s heart ‘melted away as snow’ to hear them singing. My mother always read that poem aloud to us with such passion, especially when the Lady, leaving her Lord for the gypsies, asks: ‘What care I for a goose-feather bed, / With the sheet turned down so bravely, O?’

In the pictures, the Lady is loose-haired, bare-footed under a sky luminous with dusk. This was my mother’s vision of herself free from domesticity; from responsibilities. From all that caring.

After a while, my mother declaring she would run away with the gypsies became a half-joke. She sometimes added that she might eat baked hedgehog. Typing this, another vague memory comes back – hedgehog-flavoured crisps. Can that be right? My father bringing them back in that sack of different-flavoured crisps taped around his classroom … It’s surely an untrustworthy memory. (I am writing a memoir of the time before I was five, I remind myself. They are all untrustworthy memories. The whole project is absurd.)

It is six o’clock, which is dinner-and-show time in our house. I know, I know, they shouldn’t be so used to TV dinners (no lectures, please). The children slurp noodles; Daddy Pig is failing to put up a picture. I google hedgehog crisps and there they are: 1981 … Inspired by the old gypsy stories of baking hedgehog … actually pork fat and herbs …

Bizarrely, the Office of Fair Trading took the manufacturers to court on a charge of false advertising, and they ended up having to interview gypsies who’d eaten actual hedgehog in order to make them taste more hedgehoggy.

A share of the profits went to a wildlife hospital called St Tiggywinkles.

Distraction, of course, is another type of absence, too easy now in this time of mobile phones; of parents doing an online Ocado shop while their children cause chaos in the ball-pool. Distracted mothers are still fairly rare in picture books, although there is Bernard’s mother and that woman in Sendak’s Outside Over There, catatonic, gazing numbly out to sea while (in one of the most chilling picture book images of all time) the goblins abduct her baby and replace it with one ‘made all of ice’. Mrs Large, in Jill Murphy’s series about an elephant family, is unusual in being depicted as an individual with her own needs which are often separate from her family’s. She wants to lose weight, go out for the evening, have ‘five minutes’ peace’ in the bath with a piece of leftover cake – but she is always dragged, largely cheerfully, back into the fray.

Mainly, it is fathers who are distracted. Author and illustrator Anthony Browne’s Gorilla (1983) is perhaps the most disturbing depiction of a father absent even when he is in the house. It is a story about a young girl, Hannah, who has never seen a gorilla yet is obsessed by them: drawing them, watching them, reading about them. Her father seems to be her only parent (the breakfast table is set for two). Has the mother abandoned them? Died? The atmosphere seems heavy with grief. Hannah, though, is not yearning for her lost mum but for her dad. When he is with her, her father holds up his broadsheet newspaper like a wall, as cold as the fridge behind him. In the evenings he works at his desk with his back to her, always too busy to be bothered. The gorilla seems to represent the male figure she yearns for: strong, protective, flesh and blood. Browne has explained his repeated use of apes by noting: ‘My dad was a boxer so he had this fierce, physical presence … he was a big man, but kindly, and gorillas are like that: powerful, capable of aggression, but mostly gentle, sensitive.’

The book emerged, for Browne, from a childhood memory of longing for a real trumpet, but only being given a plastic toy one and being deeply disappointed. Hannah longs for a real gorilla for her birthday but her father only gets her a toy. Then, in the night, it grows into a huge, tender giant – a hulking, smiling beast who puts on her father’s coat and swings her off through the treetops for a trip to the zoo.

It is such a sad book. Even the page on which Hannah and the gorilla dance on the lawn and we are told ‘Hannah had never been so happy’ can make me start to well up. All she wants is a few bright moments of attention. She is dancing a clumsy waltz, her feet on the gorilla’s feet. He is leaving soon. The chimpanzees in the zoo, too, their wrinkled faces pressed against the bars, are ‘beautiful. But sad.’

Home is a cage for Hannah and her father. Everything in the kitchen is patterned with a check like a cage. The wallpaper in her father’s study has vertical stripes like bars. We see Hannah through the metal bars of her bed.

Work is a cage. Masculinity is a cage. Loss is a cage.

Anthony Browne grew up in his grandparents’ pub near Bradford, which he remembers as ‘cramped, dark, cold, and pretty rough – working-class men drinking Tetley’s bitter, which was known as “fighting beer”. My dad watered it down, but it didn’t stop the fighting.’ Their mother once made the mistake of mentioning she hated her name Doris, and was teasingly referred to by her sons as ‘Our Doris’ ever after. His father had seen harrowing things in the Second World War; had killed German guards with his bare hands. A gentle man, he was traumatized by what he had done. One day he wrestled a vacuum cleaner to the floor, mistaking it for a German. Still, he had won a Military Cross in North Africa, and Browne and his brother Michael saw their father as a hero whom they wanted to emulate. He liked to draw and acted every year in the local pantomime.

On Easter Monday when he was seventeen, Browne’s father died in front of him. His heart had been damaged by rheumatic fever as a child, so was known to be weak, but Browne had refused to think about it. Then one day his father was mending a plug when suddenly he fell as if in slow motion, and started to writhe. He frothed at the mouth. In his biography Playing the Shape Game, co-written with his son, Browne describes with awful honesty how his mother began ‘hopeless, uneducated resuscitation procedures … mimicking the histrionic gestures of TV doctors’. Finally: ‘he was just lying there: this great, god-like figure on the floor, amid this scene of total devastation. I’d thought he was invincible …’

If Gorilla seems, in some way, to express anger at the failures of fathers, it ends with a moment of redemption. Throughout the pages of Gorilla red is Hannah’s colour – the colour of her top, her boots, the gorilla’s bow tie, the favourite foods she orders when, after the zoo, the gorilla takes her to a café for a slap-up birthday feed (ketchup, raspberries, cakes and sundaes topped with shining cherries). On her birthday morning her dad is wearing red too, and he holds her shoulders. It is a moment of connection. They have found each other. There is, we notice, a banana in his back pocket.

Browne’s own encounter with the largest living primate didn’t end so well. He was asked to present a programme on picture books, and the producer thought it would make good TV for him to meet his first gorilla. Unfortunately, the zoo owner had fought with the TV company about payment, and, as Browne went in, the zoo owner threw rose petals into the cage. ‘These are like sweets for gorillas,’ Browne has recounted. ‘They get very excited. And the first gorilla came up to me and suddenly sank her teeth into my calf. It was the most excruciating pain I’ve ever felt.’

The leg of his jeans turned black with blood.

In their 2005 study ‘Gender Role Stereotyping of Parents in Children’s Picture Books: The Invisible Father’, David A. Anderson and Mykol Hamilton looked at a sample of 200 picture books including Caldecott winners, best-sellers, and New York Public Library’s list of ‘books everyone should know’ and concluded that:

Mothers were shown more often than fathers as caring nurturers who discipline their children and express a full range of emotions. Fathers were under-represented and portrayed as relatively stoic actors who took little part in the lives of their children.

And if the fathers we expose our preschoolers to are not distracted or absent, they are often incompetent like Daddy Pig – progenitor of a thousand think-pieces called ‘What Peppa Pig Tells Us About British Fatherhood’ – who can’t even flip a pancake, read a map or do a couple of press-ups, and is the butt of family jokes (the password to get into Peppa’s tree house is ‘Daddy’s Big Tummy’) – or the clumsy elephant Mr Large, who can’t run the house for a day without a series of domestic disasters in Jill Murphy’s Mr Large In Charge.

Papa Bear, from the Berenstain Bear series by Jan and Stan Berenstain, was the first of the slapstick dads. He is almost over-present and irritatingly competitive; always pontificating or showing off, with terrible consequences. Theodor Geisel (Dr Seuss himself) helped edit their first book for Random House’s ‘Beginner Books’ imprint. He was a stringent editor, telling the Berenstains that their first book had too many ‘convenience’ rhymes which didn’t add to the narrative and their line lengths were ‘all over the place’. In The Big Honey Hunt (1962) Papa Bear refuses to go to the store for honey as Mama Bear has suggested, and instead ends up taking his son on a wild chase where they encounter skunks, a porcupine and a swarm of bees before ending up in a river. ‘There are already too many bears,’ Seuss warned them. ‘Sendak’s got some kind of a bear. There’s Yogi Bear, the Three Bears, Smokey Bear, the Chicago Bears.’ The Berenstains ignored him and over 200 books followed, many of which follow the same plot beats – Papa tries to teach his son to cycle and there are a series of embarrassing accidents, etc. In my favourite, The Bears’ Picnic (1966), Papa Bear keeps swearing he will find a better picnic spot but leads them into a biblical plague of mosquitos; a rubbish dump; an exposed clifftop during a storm (they end up picnicking in their house at the dining table).

The formula has been boiled down by the Berenstains themselves as follows: ‘Papa sets out to instruct Small Bear in some aspect of the art of living and ends up badly the worse for wear, with Small Bear expressing his appreciation for the fine lesson Papa has taught him.’ The main lesson, then, is schooling children in sarcasm. Over time the Berenstains tried various defences of Papa Bear, including the fact that his ‘bullheadedness’ was based on Stan’s own. ‘It’s a comedy cliché,’ Stan suggested. ‘It’s The Honeymooners … It’s vaudeville.’ Also, Mama Bear mainly stays at home with an apron on because female bears are apparently ‘terrifyingly good mothers’ while the male ones ‘make lousy fathers’. Behind Papa Bear and all the fools who follow him, though, is the implication that a father’s parenting skills somehow matter less. To portray a mother in the same way would seem horrifically cruel, because it would be to attack (wouldn’t it?) her entire sense of self.

In our house, it should be said, though, it was my mum whom we compared to Papa Bear, with her endless spot-picking. And my father was, for his generation, a very present father – teachers didn’t have such long hours then and he was pretty efficient with his preparation, always back soon after 3.30 p.m., around in the summer holidays. He didn’t mind hoovering, pushing prams, washing up (although he always sang, to the tune of Scott Walker’s ‘Make It Easy On Yourself’: ‘Washing up is so very hard to DOO-ooOO-ooOO’), polishing the coffee table (daily, a touch of obsessiveness again). He liked to keep a diary, recording our family’s little victories.

My husband Richard and I share the bedtime reading. I have been consciously looking for books with better fathers in them, but there aren’t many. Peck Peck Peck by Lucy Cousins (of Maisy fame) is lovely – after a woodpecker teaches his son to peck, the little woodpecker pecks holes in literally everything he comes across that day (a teddy bear and Jane Eyre, shampoo and the loo, margarine and seventeen jelly beans) until he’s made himself dizzy. In the end, rather than disciplining him as you might expect, the father is full of pride, saying ‘that’s fantastic’ and then pecking him with kisses. Some Dogs Do by Jez Alborough features a father whose belief in his son lifts him up. Then there is Martin Waddell and Barbara Firth’s Can’t You Sleep, Little Bear? Anthony Browne’s My Dad (‘He’s alright, my dad’). A handful of others – but each is, you feel, slightly aware of itself as an anomaly.

When I think of picture books that show the reality of family life, Shirley Hughes would be near the top of my list. She catches the texture of the everyday with a young family like no one else – lost keys, ‘wild white washing’ on the line, crusts on the floor, dens made from blankets draped over furniture, wet socks, little cars left out in the garden, fridges messy with magnets. Annie Rose slides around on her potty and Bernard blows bubbles in jelly. Hughes works in gouache, which has more body than watercolour, and works hard at keeping the energy of her rough sketches, finishing by ‘crisping up’ detail with a very sharp pencil. Her pictures have the spontaneity and slight ugliness of reality; its dirty surfaces. The mothers are kind and slightly frazzled, like the mum in Alfie Gets in First who brings the shopping in then goes out to unstrap Annie Rose from the buggy and ends up locked out with Alfie inside. It’s an incredibly clever picture book – Hughes uses the ‘gutter’ down the middle to represent the door – and manages to capture the kind of domestic dramas that make up preschool life, both incredibly minor and yet remembered forever, in a way few others are. She reminds me these small moments are the moments of our lives.

Hughes’s own family life, as a child, featured an often-absent father. She was brought up with her two older sisters in the ‘posh’ suburbs of Liverpool, a city that was both the source of her family’s wealth and a place of great poverty, and where she saw young women who had lost all their teeth from rickets and ‘a man with a barrow selling bricks for people to hurl through the windows of Irish people’. Hughes’s father was T. J. Hughes, who ran a chain of well-known department stores. He worked thirteen-hour days and she recalls him being ‘nice when I met him’. But in 1932 his health began to suffer due to depression and he was said to have ‘retired’. Her son, the journalist Ed Vulliamy, has written that ‘what actually happened is one of the roaring silent stories in a city usually so assertive about its history’ – T. J. Hughes found that, after taking time off, control of the business had been taken away from him. ‘My grandfather boarded the Liverpool–Dublin ferry for a trip he had planned and was never seen again.’

Hughes’s father absented himself for all time then, his body lost to the vast grey waters.

Asked whether she would include darker subjects in her children’s books, Hughes has answered: ‘I don’t think you should inflict this stuff on young children, you’ve got to give them the idea that the world is a pretty nice place and it’s very interesting rather more than to watch out in case something awful happens, that’s for later.’

Soon afterwards the war came. Hughes remembers how: ‘My mother, quite a shy person, went from sitting in her nice garden with the maid bringing her tea to being this hard-pressed figure wearing an overcoat inside because it was so cold.’ She recalls that: ‘It was a very tough time. Children today think the war was daring but, in fact, if you lived at home it was just deadly boring … You really had to amuse yourself, so I did a lot of drawing.’ After it was over, desperate to escape the class-conscious suburbs with their pressure to get engaged (her eldest sister married young), Hughes moved to London, where she rented a freezing bedsit and hawked her portfolio around the city’s publishers with little success.

After marrying the architect John Vulliamy in 1952, Hughes settled in Notting Hill and they began a family. Hughes has described those early years with small children as a time of ‘crushing responsibility’, but she was observing and sketching, even as she felt that illustrators like Quentin Blake were overtaking her while she was in the ‘pram lane’. Her first book as an author-illustrator, Lucy & Tom’s Day, appeared only in 1960. It is, fittingly, a story about her great subject – siblings.

It is telling that my memories begin with discovering, through her hospitalization, that my mother was pregnant with my sister. Perhaps it caused a kind of fall into history; the realization that things would change and keep changing. The arrival of a sibling is ultimate peekaboo; nine months of hushed crouching in the belly then up they pop. It is a fraught moment for both the older child and the parents, with a whole section of the picture book market dedicated to getting the elder sibling into the right mental space (and making money from parental anxiety) via the ‘new baby’ genre: There’s Going to Be a Baby; Waiting for Baby; There’s a House inside my Mummy; Mummy, Mummy, What’s in Your Tummy?; Where Did that Baby Come From?; I Love you Baby; Hello Baby; Welcome Baby; I Just Couldn’t Wait to Meet You; The New Small Person; My Baby Sister; My Little Brother; I’m a New Big Brother; I’m a New Big Sister. The commercial imperative is clear in the way most franchises have shoehorned in a baby book – Mr Men: My Sister; Spot’s Baby Sister; Guess How Much I Love You: My Baby Book; Babar and the New Baby; Angelina and the New Baby; Topsy and Tim – The New Baby; Miffy and the New Baby; The Berenstain Bears’ New Baby.

There are a couple of titles that seem to treat the enormity of the situation with appropriate gravitas, such as Anthony Browne’s Changes, in which the boy’s anxieties are hinted at in background images – a TV screen shows a cuckoo forcing baby sparrows out of their nest. Mainly, though, the books are masterpieces of euphemism, as is The Birds and the Bees and the Berenstain Bears by Jan and Stan Berenstain that declares, archly: ‘When a mama bear’s lap slowly disappears / she has some special news to tell her little dears!’ Plot-wise, the actual psychological drama – the usurpation and betrayal – is deliberately downplayed to the point of tedium. Miffy paints a picture of some chicks and, showing rather advanced crafting skills, makes a blue wool mouse (presumably for the baby but this is not specified), holds the baby on her knee, then gets to take cake to school. Small Bear helps his father to make him a new bigger bed. Sharing your parents with a demanding new person is treated as one of the lesser occasions, like a wobbly tooth or pancake day.

When I was pregnant with Cate, I dutifully read these to Gruff. I was trying to use them, I suppose, as what the writer Julia Donaldson dismisses as ‘picture-book medicine: if I read this book three times a day to her then she might go to school and smile and overcome all her own problems.’ When Gruff showed little interest, I worried that he wasn’t worried; that he had no idea what upheaval was coming.

When his sister Cate was eventually born, he seemed basically fine with it, but I was not – two was exhausting, impossible, and I felt that every moment I wasn’t breastfeeding I had to lavish him with attention so he wouldn’t be jealous; so he wouldn’t be one of those children who you’re afraid to leave in a room with your baby. You know, the ones you’ve heard about who gouge and pull; push pillows into faces to ‘make baby quiet’.

The second pregnancy had harrowed my body. My first felt like a blossoming; the second a grim process of entropy. Cystitis, piles, varicose veins, my first grey hairs. The first months too were less miraculous this time, more simply anxious. It was the summer of Brexit. Our pet fish began to die – Bing I, Bang II, Bong I – slowing and struggling until it was sickening to watch their gills gasp and we had to throw them in the bin. Gruff broke his foot on his scooter; he was given a blue cast that began to smell in the heat. That week the whole family took worming tablets. The nights were clammy, and Cate slept beside us in our bedroom, in a Moses basket balanced on a coffee table, zipped into a tiny sleeping bag. If Richard was out and the window was open I would be certain with every siren (there are a lot of sirens in Peckham) that uniformed men were coming to my door with terrible news (do not ask for whom the siren wails; it wails for you).

I breastfed that year in the thin blue light of Twitter trolling on my iPhone. Update, uphate. When her head slumped I’d lay her back down but couldn’t switch off myself. In the dark, drained, sweating beneath the curdled duvet, I would hear the mice begin to move. Small pink claws scratching against wood, a horror-movie sound effect like undead nails scraping a coffin lid. A scuttle that moved along the skirting boards, making me taut with attention. I imagined them somehow crawling up into the basket of my sleeping baby daughter, dirty, twitching. Pissing in bedding. Teeth testing her cheek.

We laid cruel, cheap traps under the bed, baited with peanut butter crackers, but night after night nothing snapped them into silence, they came and soiled the dark, made me listen to every squeak and breath of hers or theirs.

And as I lay awake my worries ricocheted between the world and the mice and Gruff – how he was coping or not, how he seemed to sense something had shifted. His thrashing tantrum in that lift at his auntie’s wedding.

His trembling-lipped no, no, when I sang her the first verse of that lullaby: ‘O hush thee, my love.’

The siblings in Shirley Hughes’s books are a model and a comfort, always tolerant of each other, fondly muddling through. Tom and Lucy, Katie and Olly, My Naughty Little Sister, Alfie and Annie Rose. Then, of course, there are Joe, Dave and older sister Bella in Dogger.

Dogger is another tale of lost and found, one that can be read over and over as a reassurance. Fort-da. Fort-da. It is based on a real toy that belonged to Shirley’s son Ed. The original Dogger can be seen in the documentary Shirley Hughes – What Do Artists Do All Day? with his bald patches and distinct, single, upturned ear – stuck that way from being slept against so much. Dogger is not just a bedtime ‘cuddler’ (as we say in our house) but a constant playmate, being dragged around on string or wrapped in blankets. Eventually, Dave leaves Dogger somewhere. (It is not stated explicitly, but the pictures seem to suggest that Dave leaves Dogger poking through the school railings. He is distracted by an ice-cream van, then giving his little brother Joe ‘in-between licks’ of his melty pink cornet.)

The school fair comes, along with a series of delightfully nostalgic illustrations that explain the book’s enduring charm (‘nearly new’ stalls, a lucky-dip barrel, a fancy-dress parade with a Dalek, a wheelbarrow race where half the wheelbarrows’ faces look smushed). Bella wins an alarmingly large teddy with a blue silk bow in the raffle. But then Dave sees Dogger on the toy stall where he can’t afford the 5p price tag. He can’t find Mum and Dad, only, eventually, Bella – but by then Dogger has been bought, and the girl won’t sell him back. Dave cries and cries.

‘Then Bella did something very kind.’

Jesus, it made me start to weep just typing that out.

Bella swaps her giant teddy with the blue bow for Dogger.

Just look at how Hughes has caught Bella’s stance, as she awkwardly but solemnly accepts Dave’s grateful hug. She tells Dave she won’t miss the big teddy: ‘Anyway, if I had another teddy in my bed there wouldn’t be room for me.’

Those first weeks pass.

One bright afternoon I’d just got Cate to nap and was adjusting the nipple pads when I finally saw a mouse stare sweetly up at me from the floor, harmless as the design on a nursery curtain. The next night the trap broke its neck. Cate began to sleep through and moved into a cot in the next room, and Gruff gave her his Igglepiggle to cuddle.

Better slept, my fears receded: I watched my children grow fond of each other.

I don’t understand, now, why I feared otherwise, as I always adored my own little sister. Mary had hair a shade darker than mine, brighter eyes, and a smaller, dirtier nose which she rubbed with a fist. She was altogether more elfin than me (perhaps our Welsh genes). In photos she always grinned daftly, scrunched or gurning, an adorable gargoyle. Freckles smeared her lip. Like my father, she tipped towards obsessive: counting jelly sweets in jars, testing boundaries, repeatedly making teddies do the V sign. She was never more his daughter than when we had our annual Grand National buffet of picnic eggs and cream cakes, and every one of her cuddly toys received a betting slip (the winner was tucked into her bed that night). We got on well, because we accepted our assigned roles – knowing I was serious and bookish, Mary decided to be sociable and sporty. She got cute and funny; I took patient and wise.

In Dogger, of course I am the older sister. I liked giving Mary toys she would enjoy more than me, like my Sylvanian Families mole. Does my throat catch then at my own kindness? Perhaps, but it’s for something else too.

However much you love an adult, they must bear their struggles and sadnesses themselves. Sometimes you must accept you cannot help; sometimes they are bent on destroying themselves and you cannot stop them. But when you love a small child, for a little while at least, their joy can be entirely within your gift. I know this now as a mother but learnt it first as a big sister. It’s so simple: a bubble, a tickle, a lolly, a wriggly worm, a toy lost then found. Happy endings cost a few pence, are two-a-penny.

What luck it is, Dogger reminds us, to live in such days.